‘There was no one following on the road,’ said Chris. Victor hadn’t even thought to look. Their driver continued, ‘And if she’s had our same idea, then she’s already here.’
Chris swung his door open and stepped out. With no pretence at secrecy remaining, the other three exited in unison. Before them in the front garden of The Universalist they found a bed of glorious roses, all nestled in straight lines of different colours, and along each line darkening in gradations of shade.
‘Only an artif would have planted these,’ remarked Chris.
‘Only a female artif,’ corrected Ellie.
They walked past the lawn and the flowers toward the main house, where Beck rang the bell... to the expected lack of response. And so they went around the side toward the back garden. And from there they saw the smaller cottage, half-visible through trees and reachable by a gravel path.
Before they’d even crossed the back garden to reach the path though, the door to the smaller house had opened. And there before them was the man who had made them, and this stood no less for Beck. Only Victor was new to him; and it was he who the Professor addressed, with a hand put out to shake,
‘I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.’
Chapter 85 – The View from Rose Cottage
‘This is Victor,’ introduced Ellie. ‘He saved me.’
‘Then I owe you a great debt,’ thanked the householder.
All were standing at the door of what a small wooden sign declared to be Rose Cottage. For those first few moments, the meeting remained as staid and dignified as their approach to the house had been. All that changed though when, from behind a row of flower-laden trellises, appeared a young woman.
She was so much younger-seeming than Ellie, as she dropped the basket she was holding and pulled off her gardening gloves. The scene struck Beck with an uncertainty and doubt he couldn’t place. The non-human members of the host might have got there a fraction earlier, but it took Doctor Beck a full three seconds to realise that Anna was in her teenage frame.
‘What happened?’ asked Ellie.
‘It’s how she’s comfortable,’ answered the Professor. Beck noticed that in his voice was still the trace of his German past.
The sisters, long dreaming of this moment, were paralysed: Ellie from shock and Anna from... Ellie knew not what.
‘Anna, are you all right?’
‘Oh, Ellie.’
The pair ran together and crashed into a hug.
Schmidt ushered the men in, ‘Come on, let us leave them their moment.’
The scene they had just witnessed seemed more important than awkward getting-to-know-yous, which would no doubt happen later. In those first surreal moments of being in the same room again, all Beck could say was,
‘But it’s regression, of a sort of which no human has ever been capable. Do you realise how harmful, psychologically...?’
Schmidt cut across his one-time apprentice,
‘And do you realise how it hurt her, losing the others, Mrs Winters, you? You were all her family, and suddenly you’d gone.’
Beck quietened and remembered: even before the end Anna had become lonely, what with Bradley leaving and the others going out to jobs. He asked a calmer question,
‘And you’ve been here for all this time?’
‘No, we moved around for a while. We stayed in hotels, tired places where no one cared about an old man and a young woman travelling together. Once the storm had died down, we came here. I’d already equipped it, in an unobvious way.’
‘Equipped?’
‘A charger, some simple tools. Nothing more. I wanted somewhere like another Springfields for Anna, but smaller, tucked away, and where the landlord wouldn’t ask questions.’
‘Ingrid?’
He nodded, ‘Her final gift to me.’
‘As Bradley had been yours to her.’ These words were said by Christopher, for whom the presence of the Professor was no less monumental.
‘And you, my boy. I always knew you’d hold true.’ The Professor shook Chris’s hand, then Beck’s, asking them both, ‘And so which of you do I have to thank for all of this?’
Beck answered modestly, ‘Oh, we only met again three days ago. It’s Chris who was running things.’
‘Always so resourceful,’ said his co-creator proudly.
‘I only used the gifts you gave me,’ added Chris, equally modestly. To which the Professor answered,
‘I gave you capacity – what you filled that space with was your own. But the alarms,’ he remembered. ‘Danny isn’t with you?’
‘No,’ answered Chris.
‘But not terminal? Anna told me.’
‘No, not terminal. He was the second signal.’
‘The first?’
‘Myself, I’m afraid. An altercation – public transport.’
‘A fight on a bus?’
‘A fight with a bus. But I’m fine, I assure you.’
Victor had been listening to all this with wondrous bemusement. The Professor turned to him,
‘I’m sorry, this must all seem very abstract to you.’
‘No, it’s fascinating.’
‘And I swear it is worth it. It really is the greatest game in town. Christopher,’ the Professor turned his gaze, ‘would you mind if I fixed us three a drink?’
The question was only a politeness, as was Christopher’s movement of the arms to release them to the sitting room he had already scoped out from the hallway. Beck moved last, and in the doorway he caught Schmidt, Beck saying,
‘We need words.’
‘I know,’ came the answer. ‘But not yet,’ and the Professor led on to the lounge.
Chapter 86 – Africa – When Money Holds no Value
From the low sofa in the large varnished lounge, Bradley looked out through the mosquito net that covered the open windows. He had been watching for hours; as he had been doing for three days now. Looking for the men in black.
‘Why black?’ he muttered to himself again. ‘Out in that heat?’
Bradley thought he could see them always now, like charcoal figures against the white sun; and always at the very edge of their property, at the furthest tree. Super-sensitive eyesight could be a curse.
In the intervening days, the situation had worsened. The men on the horizon were becoming more numerous, and measures were now understood to have to be taken. At the very least, a trip away was needed, if only for Bradley’s sanity.
‘I should be out there with Ingrid, making arrangements,’ he said to his familiar, ever present and dutiful.
‘I understand your feelings, sir,’ answered George. ‘Though on this issue I agree with the Mistress. At the present time, it makes more sense for you to remain safely indoors.’
And Sir agreed with the Mistress too, or else he would have been out in town helping, and not cooped up inside and having the same conversation with George that they had had three times already that morning.
‘But a man doesn’t like to be impotent, George.’
‘Indeed, a most unfortunate feeling. Anyway, here’s Mistress back.’
Looking out at the fields to the back of the property, Bradley had missed her arrival. Now he turned to watch the approach of the big old Mercedes along the front drive.
George watched it too. Behind the car came its ever-present cloud of dust, which to him always called to mind bridesmaids rushing behind a bride, carrying the train of her dress. Every time the car went out it got filthy; and every time it returned it was cleaned back to gleaming by loyal George. Although the mechanical maintenance was the Master’s area, his big boy’s toy. ‘The best of the century,’ Bradley called it. ‘You can’t repair those modern engines,’ he would say to George across the garage. ‘Full of computers.’ And George, busy with his chamois leather, would smile at the joke.
As for Oman, the Mistress’s attendant, he would generally be in the kitchen, a whizz at the Aga. While the Mistress herself would spend the evenings reading. Or writ
ing; often her diary, or more recently a romance, of lovers in mystical Arabia, trapped in exile but needing only each other. When George looked in on her to ask if she needed anything, she would recite her latest chapter. And he would listen and smile, for she had a fine writer’s voice to match her actor’s voice – good words, read well.
‘Do you believe in love?’ she would ask George afterwards. Then answering for him, ‘But of course you do. I see it every time you bring our Master his paper or tell him the car is out front. I think you love him just as much as I do.’
And George did, in his way. Though mostly at those moments he was marvelling at his Mistress; at her voice, in which all trace of Germany was gone and replaced by something rich and warm and Mediterranean, blown in on the sirocco wind.
‘I do, George. I believe in love. I’ve had two great affairs, either one enough for any woman’s lifetime. And each still love me, my Kind Professor building my Bradley for me. Which makes me love him even more than when we were together – as if that were possible.’
And then the question she would have George ask, the only time he’d ever dare to enquire of his Mistress’s feelings, and only then because it was bidden,
‘And why did you part, ma’am?’
‘The Professor and I?’ she’d ask, as if the whole sequence weren’t as well-rehearsed as her many famous stage appearances once were. ‘Because we were rebels, and when we found peace, it didn’t suit us.’ And she would smile, revealing that there was absolutely no regret.
Then would come memories of East Germany, of the secret police, of love under watch, and of finally broaching the Wall. And George would listen intently, nudging the conversation this way or that way when required.
George was the Master’s servant, Oman the Mistress’s. Though for these exchanges she needed George, as among Oman’s very many competencies was not a grasp of the Queen’s English to the subtlety required. It brought George great pride that he was chosen.
They had been good years at the lodge. He would remember them. But, back to present duty...
Although he couldn’t show it, George was greatly relieved to have the Mistress return in the Mercedes that morning. It broke the mood of the room carried by the Master’s monomania, and might also provide some news of their predicament. Since seeing the first figure on the horizon several days before, everything had changed.
A butler’s duty was sometimes to be anonymous; and so it was as he opened the door to the Mistress and she swept right in to say to the other man in the room,
‘It’s no good, B.’
‘Mistress,’ greeted ignored George, who after letting her and Oman in was about to leave them to their discussion.
‘No, George, you stay,’ she announced. ‘You too, Oman,’ who was a large man of Middle Eastern extraction in a tweed coat and bowler hat, who would have died for his Mistress as George would have for his Master.
‘I need you all to hear this. The Chief of Police would not give me his word.’
‘For what, ma’am?’ asked the butler.
‘For assurance of our safety in the town.’
George gasped, then quickly corrected himself. The Mistress continued,
‘He said he would have liked to have done so, and was adamant that the problem wasn’t with his most loyal and closest men, but... well, you can guess the rest.’
‘And after all you’ve done for them.’ George shook his head sadly.
‘Twenty-thousand last year, wasn’t it?’ said Bradley, finally tearing himself away from the netted window and striding between the sofas to the heart of the room.
‘These men outside will pay a lot more,’ she said sadly.
‘But what in God’s name are they doing here?’ Bradley asked of no one in particular. ‘Sure, we’ve had spotters before, photographers. But never this many, and never anyone the Chief of Police was scared of.’
‘I think I know.’ Ingrid held her hand out for a newspaper that Oman passed to her. She unfolded the front page and held it gingerly to Bradley. ‘It might be bad news, Darling.’
Bradley read the same headline that Britain had read the day before:
ROBOTS: TO BE REVEALED TODAY!
She added, ‘And I saw another headline from yesterday’s papers in the shop window, it must have just arrived from England: “The Robots are Real”.’
‘That’s why our paper hasn’t come for two days,’ he realised.
‘It’s worse than that,’ she added. ‘The shop wouldn’t serve me; wouldn’t take my money. The family wouldn’t even look me in the eye.’
‘So where did you buy this?’ Bradley was holding the paper now, transfixed, like a sleeper coming awake in a dream.
She looked to Oman for support before answering, he nodding that she should say; which she did,
‘It was thrown at me as we left the shop, by the woman in the house opposite.’
Bradley was staggered, ‘What... the one who fixes your dresses?’
She nodded.
He asked, ‘Are they scared of the men in black? Or of us?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Then asked him, ‘Bradley. Is something happening with... the others, in England?’
‘I think it must be,’ he answered, and took the paper to his window sofa to read.
Chapter 87 – Words
Meeting the Professor, seeing him again, couldn’t help but play on Beck’s mind. As tearful greetings were going on elsewhere in the cottage, he collared Chris,
‘He seems so much older,’ observed Beck.
‘He was old to begin with,’ reasoned his creation. ‘He’d had at least two careers before we knew him. Perhaps his enthusiasm gave a youthful impression?’
‘Perhaps,’ conceded Beck.
‘We all age.’
‘Says Dorian Gray.’
‘Oh, even I’m wearing out, behind the scenes, so to speak.’
A while later, the Professor and Beck had their own chance to talk. Now at last the apprentice stood before the master, just the two of them. Schmidt shut the door to his light-filled workshop.
Beck didn’t want to ask the most important thing, but Schmidt answered it anyway without his prompting. Again Beck heard and loved that famous voice, still bearing the faintest Germanic flicker,
‘Eight years ago, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Right. I had a phone call from Washington – on a scrambled line, no less. He asked me if I knew anything of “A program for advanced artificial intelligence”?’
‘We never called it that,’ answered Beck, though Schmidt was already waving his words away,
‘I said “No,” and asked him why he asked. He told me that it was our own government who were asking the White House!’
‘Our government knew of us?’
‘No, not a clue. But the Prime Minister back then had had the bejesus scared out of him watching a horror movie of robots taking over the world...’
‘Lord alive.’
‘...and so the next morning, he put the feelers out among his own departments and the big research and development contractors – was anyone doing this thing? How real was it? How dangerous was it?’
‘The message didn’t get to us.’
‘No, but it got to the University Board, who batted it away as ridiculous. Artificial limbs were our field – or so they thought!’
‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,’ said Beck
‘He also put the word out to his friends in America, judging that they’d be further along the road. They then called me.’
‘Why you?’
‘Because, in my time in America after the Wall came down, I met a lot of people and discussed a lot of ideas. And one of those I met was a scientist at a major university, and one of the things we had discussed was artificial intelligence...’
‘He knew about the project?’
‘No, this was pure theory, years before I met you. But he’d remembered our talk, and called me up.’
‘And you told him that you had no idea of what our Prime Minister was on about?’ Beck was panicking now.
‘Yes. And the very next morning, I brought Anna out here to the cottage for the day, to get her used to staying at the place. We started planting roses.’
‘You were planning your escape?’
‘No, this was to be our luftschutzbunker – how would you say it? Bomb-shelter. A place for her to stay a couple of nights in an emergency. I couldn’t know it would all end.’
‘And you didn’t think to share the news with the rest of us, that the Government was scouring the land for projects like ours?’
‘I had to protect her. I thought, “If some of the others get caught, very well. They could live with it, even make something of it, but I have to protect her.” I had no idea that they would all get away. Don’t be angry, Gawain. We had a responsibility to Anna.’
And Beck knew this as well as the Professor. Beck asked,
‘Then at least explain this... regression.’ For Beck still had no happier word for what had happened to Anna in his absence.
‘Eliza’ (For Schmidt alone had always called her by her proper name) ‘had once caught Anna looking at their younger frames. She told me Anna had said how happy she had been as a child!’
‘I’m not sure she was.’
‘Not when very young, but later, with Mrs Winters and the away-days. She idealised those days, even though they were only a few years before. And if it made her happier...’
The Professor continued, ‘I knew that the events to come could traumatise her, so – a step backward to make one forward – it was never meant to last. But then, this nowhere-state was never meant to go on eight years, huh?
‘The girls’ teenage frame was in good shape, and so on one of our weekend trips I smuggled it here – I also took the others and destroyed them, just in time it turned out. Then after the fall of Springfields, after ferrying around the hotels for those difficult months, we came back here for good and I found the frame. I didn’t even need to ask her. She saw it and said, “I want to go to sleep and wake up like that again.”
‘I transferred her centre and made one join with a soldering iron. And not a bad one at that, although I say so myself, and given the conditions I had to work in.